HONG KONG — The increasingly vicious trade war between Washington and Beijing took another turn Wednesday when China imposed an additional 50% tariff on imports from the U.S., hiking its levies on American imports to 84%. The tit-for-tat escalation came hours after President Donald Trump’s 104% tariffs on Chinese imports went into effect, including 50% Trump added Monday. Later Wednesday, Trump increased the overall U.S. tariff on Chinese goods to 125%, even as he paused higher targeted tariffs on other countries for 90 days while keeping a 10% baseline tariff in place for all countries. Trump’s 50% tariff is a “mistake upon another mistake,” China’s Customs Tariff Commission said in a statement earlier Wednesday, adding that the world’s two biggest economies should “resolve differences through equal dialogue based on mutual respect.” The effect of China’s 84% tariff may be somewhat limited because China imports only about $160 billion a year in U.S. goods compared with the more than $400 billion in goods it exports to the U.S. “I don’t think they can match in the economic realm, because the relationship is so unbalanced,” said Rick Waters, the Singapore-based director of the Carnegie China think tank. “So what they tend to do is move into adjacent realms to exact a price.” Here's a look at some of the other measures China might take. U.S. agricultural products and poultry China could greatly increase tariffs on U.S. agricultural products, or even stop importing them completely. “I think there’s a very high chance that China will stop agricultural imports from the U.S. altogether,” said Tianchen Xu, a Beijing-based economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a financial forecasting service. “It’s a weapon targeting Trump’s supporter base,” he added. Soybeans, which are crushed to make protein-rich animal feed ingredients and vegetable oils, have been at the heart of the U.S.-China trade dispute for some time. U.S. exports of soybeans to China fell 75% after China imposed a retaliatory 25% tariff on them in 2018, during Trump’s first-term trade war with Beijing. The Trump administration announced $12 billion in subsidies for farmers to offset the impact, and it has again promised to step in if the latest round of tariffs hurts the industry further. China could also put further restrictions on American poultry products, having announced an import ban on two U.S. companies last week. China, which frequently trades places with North America as the world’s largest box office, is a crucial market for Hollywood films. Though China has an annual quota for the number of foreign movies that can appear in its theaters, it could ban Hollywood films altogether. American movies have already been declining in popularity in recent years as U.S.-China trade tensions have escalated. There were no Hollywood films among China’s 10 highest-grossing movies in 2023, in stark contrast to 2012, when seven of the top 10 highest-grossing movies were U.S.-made, according to Maoyan, a Chinese movie-ticketing and data platform. U.S. services sector and intellectual property The U.S. has a large trade deficit with China in goods, but it comes out ahead when it comes to services such as finance, consulting and law. U.S. data lists China as its fifth-largest export market for services, according to a report by China’s State Council released Wednesday. China could target the U.S. services sector, for example, by excluding American companies from government procurement processes or restricting their cooperation with Chinese firms. The U.S. has long accused China of stealing its intellectual property. But Beijing also has its own growing intellectual property interests, and it could investigate U.S. companies in China in an effort to protect them. Fentanyl cooperation China and the U.S. have made progress on stemming the international flow of precursor ingredients for fentanyl, some of which originate in China and are then processed into the deadly opioid in countries such as Mexico before being smuggled into the U.S. But China could bring that cooperation to a halt in response to Trump’s tariffs. “Out of humanitarian considerations, China has provided various forms of assistance to the U.S.,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said last month. “The U.S. should not repay goodwill with hostility.” Waters said it would be “counterproductive” for China to suspend cooperation on fentanyl. “It’s just going to cement narratives in the U.S. that they’re weaponizing drugs against us,” he said.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s military fired warning shots after North Korean soldiers crossed the rivals’ tense border on Tuesday, South Korean officials said. South Korea’s military said in a statement that about 10 North Korean soldiers returned to the North after South Korea made warning broadcasts and fired warning shots. It said the North Korean soldiers violated the military demarcation line at the eastern section of the border at 5 p.m. local time (4 a.m. ET). South Korea’s military said it is closely monitoring North Korean activities. Bloodshed and violent confrontations have occasionally occurred at the Koreas’ heavily fortified border, called the Demilitarized Zone. But when North Korean troops briefly violated the border in June last year and prompted South Korea to fire warning shots, it did not escalate into a major source of tensions. South Korean officials assessed that the soldiers did not deliberately commit the border intrusion and the site was a wooded area and military demarcation line signs there were not clearly visible. South Korea said the North Koreans were carrying construction tools. The motive for Tuesday’s border crossing by North Korean soldiers was not immediately clear. The 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide DMZ is the world’s most heavily armed border. An estimated 2 million mines are peppered inside and near the border, which is also guarded by barbed wire fences, tank traps and combat troops on both sides. It’s a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Animosities between the Koreas are running high now as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continues to flaunt his military nuclear capabilities and align with Russia over President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. Kim is also ignoring calls by Seoul and Washington to resume denuclearization negotiations. Since his Jan. 20 inauguration, President Donald Trump has said he would reach out to Kim again to revive diplomacy. North Korea has not responded to Trump’s remarks and says U.S. hostilities against it have deepened since Trump’s inauguration. South Korea, meanwhile, is experiencing a leadership vacuum after the ouster of President Yoon Suk Yeol last week over his ill-fated imposition of martial law.

victory in his campaign to “take back” the Panama Canal from China could be on the rocks amid pushback from Beijing. The $23 billion sale involving two ports run by CK Hutchison, a private company based in the Chinese territory of Hong Kong, to a consortium led by the U.S. investment firm BlackRock had been scheduled to be signed last week. But an agreement between the two has been delayed under pressure from China, whose market regulator launched a review of the deal as state-run newspapers attacked it as undermining China’s national interests. NBC News takes a look at the sale and what it may mean politically and economically for the United States and China, the world’s two biggest economies. Why is it important? In his inaugural speech in January, Trump claimed without providing evidence that China controlled the 50-mile canal and vowed that the United States will take back the waterway, which he said was “vital” to national security. The Panamanian government has administered the U.S.-built canal since the United States relinquished it to the Central American country in 1999. Trump did not rule out military action, and he has directed the Defense Department to draw up plans to send more troops to Panama to “reclaim” the canal, through which 40% of U.S. trade passes.

NEW DELHI — Indian police have arrested a 24-year-old American YouTuber who visited an off-limits island in the Indian Ocean and left an offering of a Diet Coke can and a coconut in an attempt to make contact with an isolated tribe known for attacking intruders. Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, of Scottsdale, Arizona, was arrested March 31, two days after he set foot on the restricted territory of North Sentinel Island — part of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands — in a bid to meet people from the reclusive Sentinelese tribe, police said. A local court last week sent Polyakov to 14 days of judicial custody, and he is set to appear again in court on April 17. The charges carry a possible sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine. Indian authorities said they had informed the U.S. Embassy about the case. Visitors are banned from traveling within 3 miles of the island, whose population has been isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years. The inhabitants use spears, bows and arrows to hunt the animals that roam the small, heavily forested island. Deeply suspicious of outsiders, they attack anyone who lands on their beaches. "The Department has no higher priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens abroad," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. "We are aware of reports of the detention of a U.S. citizen in India. We take our commitment to assist U.S. citizens abroad seriously and are monitoring the situation." In 2018, an American missionary who landed illegally on the beach was killed by North Sentinel islanders who apparently shot him with arrows and buried his body on the beach. In 2006, the Sentinelese killed two fishermen who had accidentally landed on the shore. Indian officials have limited contact with rare "gift-giving" encounters, with small teams of officials and scientists leaving coconuts and bananas for the islanders. Indian ships also monitor the waters around the island, trying to ensure that outsiders do not go near the Sentinelese, who have repeatedly made it clear they want to be left alone. Police said Polyakov was guided by GPS navigation during his journey and surveyed the island with binoculars before landing. He stayed on the beach for about an hour, blowing a whistle to attract the islanders' attention, but he got no response. He later left a can of Diet Coke and a coconut as an offering, made a video on his camera and collected some sand samples before he returned to his boat. On his return, Polyakov was spotted by local fishermen, who informed the authorities. He was arrested in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an archipelago nearly 750 miles east of India’s mainland. A case was registered for violation of Indian laws that prohibit any outsider from interacting with the islanders. Police said Polyakov had conducted detailed research on sea conditions, tides and accessibility to the island before he started his journey. "He planned meticulously over several days to visit the island and make a contact with the Sentinel tribe," Senior Police Officer Hargobinder Singh Dhaliwal said. In a statement, police said Polyakov’s “actions posed a serious threat to the safety and well-being of the Sentinelese people, whose contact with outsiders is strictly prohibited by the law to protect their indigenous way of life.” An initial investigation revealed that Polyakov had made two previous attempts to visit the islands, in October and January, including in an inflatable kayak. Police said Polyakov was drawn to the island by his passion for adventure and extreme challenges and was fascinated by the Sentinelese people's mystique. Survival International, a group that protects the rights of Indigenous peoples, said Polyakov’s attempted contact with the tribes of North Sentinel was "reckless and idiotic." "This person’s actions not only endangered his own life, they put the lives of the entire Sentinelese tribe at risk," the group’s director, Caroline Pearce, said in a statement.

HONG KONG — North Korea has once again closed its borders, suspending foreign tourism just weeks after the secretive state welcomed its first Western visitors in five years. North Korea sealed its borders in early 2020 at the start of the Covid pandemic, gradually lifting restrictions starting in mid-2023. The first tourists, a group from Russia, were allowed into the country in February 2024, but the first international visitors from other countries including Britain, Canada, France and Germany only arrived in North Korea for the first time last month. The visit by the Western group was limited to the remote northeastern city of Rason, which the North Korean government has designated a special economic zone. During the trip, they visited factories, shops and statues of late North Korean leaders. Unlike the Russians, they were not allowed to visit Pyongyang, the capital. Tour operators said Wednesday that travel to North Korea was no longer possible until further notice. It was unclear why North Korea had closed again to foreign visitors and how long the suspension would last. “We have been informed that Rason is temporarily CLOSED,” Koryo Tours, a tour operator based in Beijing, said in a statement Wednesday. “It’s an unprecedented situation.” Other travel agencies that organize North Korea trips made similar announcements. “We recommend that those planning tours in April and May refrain from booking flights until we have more information,” China-based Young Pioneer Tours said in a Facebook post, adding that refunds are available for tours that are canceled due to the abrupt change. Rason has operated differently from the rest of North Korea since it was declared a special economic zone in 1991. It has been used as a testing ground for new economic policies, the country’s first mobile phone network and the first card payment system. Before the pandemic, North Korea had hosted hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists who provided up to $175 million in extra revenue in 2019, according to the South Korea-based news outlet NK News. More recently, North Korea has been deepening ties with Russia, signing a mutual defense pact last year and sending weapons and troops to support President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. In 2024, almost 900 Russian tourists visited North Korea, the South Korean Unification Ministry said, citing official Russian data.

President Trump has claimed that the escalating trade war — which he intensified Tuesday with broad tariffs against America’s major trade partners that have sent the stock market plummeting — will spur companies to forgo foreign goods and return manufacturing to American shores. But data suggests that the U.S. economy is not ready for a wholesale shift to manufacturing and that it would take years to ramp up production capabilities. Data shows a fraction of people in the United States are employed by farms and factories compared with decades past, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with most now in service jobs such as software, finance and health care. And experts say focusing on domestic goods production could cost consumers while undermining America’s growing advantage in the knowledge economy. Sector shrink In the 1970s, 1 in 5 U.S. workers worked in manufacturing. Today, it’s closer to 1 in 12. Even with unlimited funding and political will, it takes years to reskill a labor force and rebuild infrastructure. Formal trade apprenticeships typically require four years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And Intel estimates building semiconductor fabrication plants takes three to four years to complete. Policy uncertainty is another major barrier. Companies hesitate to make long-term investments when trade policies could change within months or less. Companies “won’t even start trying to hire and train people until they are convinced that there are permanent tariffs,” said Richard Mansfield, an economist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Instead of boosting domestic production, he said, it is likelier that companies will raise prices, find alternative suppliers — Vietnam, Chile — or both. That played out during Trump’s first term when, under the threat of tariffs, companies moved production from China to Mexico. Dennis Hoffman, an economist at Arizona State University, framed the tariff impact more bluntly: “You end up hurting consumers across the entire United States.” Service strength Meanwhile, a focus on producing goods overlooks another reality: America holds a global advantage in exports of services driven by business, travel and intellectual property. The United States’ $25.2 billion services surplus is often hidden by its $156.7 billion goods deficit. Tariffs ignore that economic reality, leaving consumers with higher prices for basic goods and less to spend in the areas in which our economy excels, Hoffman said: Cheap goods mean “more money to save, to invest, to allocate elsewhere — we’re far better off because of access to international trade.” Deficits are not necessarily negative. “If you run a trade deficit, you’re not a loser,” Hoffman said. “We run trade deficits because we consume — our appetite for consumption is greater than our capacity to produce.” Path of progress As countries progress and grow wealthier, manufacturing tends to represent less of their economies, Hoffman said. Data from Our World in Data shows that while the manufacturing output of lower-income nations around the world increased from 2004 to 2020, higher-income countries went in the opposite direction.

HONG KONG — China said Thursday it would take all “necessary measures” to protect its legitimate interests after it was hit particularly hard by President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners around the world. Starting April 9, imports from the world’s second-biggest economy will be subject to an additional U.S. tariff of 34%, Trump said Wednesday at the White House, as he unveiled a long list of what he called reciprocal tariffs. That is on top of 20% in tariffs that he has imposed on China since taking office in January, bringing the total to 54% — the highest U.S. tariff on any country. The president said the new tariffs — which he described as the biggest reorganization of the global economy since World War II — are aimed at reviving domestic manufacturing and rebalancing trade relations with a wide range of countries. China said Thursday that it firmly opposed the tariffs and would take “necessary measures” to protect its interests. “The U.S., under the guise of ‘reciprocity,’ has imposed tariffs on products from multiple countries, including China, which seriously violates WTO rules and undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a briefing in Beijing. Unlike with past tariffs when smartphones and other electronics were exempt, the latest levies appear to affect them, said Tianchen Xu, a senior China economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, a financial forecasting service. “No product made in China is safe,” Tianchen said. The tariffs will be a “big blow” to China’s low-cost manufacturers, particularly at a time when Chinese President Xi Jinping is struggling to boost domestic demand, he added. In addition to the tariffs, Trump has ordered the closing of the “de minimis” trade loophole that has fueled the explosive growth of Chinese retailers such as Temu and Shein. Xu said the tariff increase could push China to negotiate, including on issues such as the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations by its Chinese owner to keep the short-video app from being banned, the deadline for which is Saturday. China “has been very reluctant to engage with the U.S., but I think its calculus might be changing,” he added. The 54% total is close to the 60% or more in tariffs that Trump threatened to impose on China during his 2024 presidential campaign, and by some calculations it is actually more than the 70% for some products when tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term are taken into account. “At this level, many Chinese products are no longer price competitive,” said Xin Sun, a political economist and China specialist at King’s College London.

A 50% reciprocal trade tariff on Lesotho, the highest levy on U.S. President Donald Trump’s long list of target economies, will kill the tiny Southern African kingdom that Trump ridiculed last month, an economic analyst there said on Thursday. Lesotho, which Trump described in March as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” is one of the world’s poorest nations with a gross domestic product of just over $2 billion. It has a large trade surplus with the United States, mostly made up of diamonds and textiles, including Levi’s jeans. Its exports to the United States, which in 2024 totalled $237 million, account for more than 10% of its GDP. Oxford Economics said the textile sector, with some 40,000 workers, was Lesotho’s biggest private employer and accounted for roughly 90% of manufacturing employment and exports. “Then you are having retailers who are selling food. And then you have residential property owners who are renting houses for the workers. So this means if the closure of factories were to happen, the industry is going to die and there will be multiplier effects,” Lesotho Private Sector Foundation CEO Thabo Qhesi said. Ridiculed for imposing trade tariffs on frozen islands largely inhabited by penguins, Donald Trump’s formula for calculating those levies has a serious side: it is also hitting some of the world’s poorest nations hardest.The math is simple: take the U.S. goods trade deficit with a country, divide it by that country’s exports to the U.S. and turn it into a percentage figure; then cut that figure in half to produce the U.S. “reciprocal” tariff, with a floor of 10%. That’s how the volcanic Australian territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands in the Antarctic ended up with a 10% tariff. The penguins got off lightly, you might say.

ROME — Italy’s main trade union confederation said Tuesday that it was joining the prosecution of a farm owner charged with the murder of an Indian migrant worker who bled to death after his arm was cut off by a piece of equipment. Antonello Lovato, 39, has been accused of abandoning the injured and bleeding Satnam Singh, 31, and failing to call an ambulance following the incident in Latina, a largely agricultural province south of Rome, on June 17, 2024. Prosecutors originally considered charging Lovato with manslaughter, but raised it to murder with malice after the fact since he was aware the actions could cause death. At the opening of his murder trial on Tuesday, Lovato said that “he lost his head,’” when he saw Singh, who was working in the country illegally, bleeding. “I wasn’t myself. I didn’t want him to die,” he was cited by the news agency ANSA as saying. Outside the court, dozens of union members, including Sikh workers wearing turbans, demonstrated against the system of exploitative, underpaid migrant labor in Italy’s agricultural sector, called “caporalato.” “I believe that what happened was apparent to everyone,” Maurizio Landini, the secretary-general of the powerful CGIL trade union federation, told the crowd. “As is the logic of exploitation known as ‘caporalato,’ which allows for people to be treated like merchandise, like parts of a machine that can be easily bought and sold for the lowest price. And I insist that it is this culture that needs to be changed.” The CGIL is joining the prosecution as civil complainants, Landini was cited by LaPresse news agency as saying. Under Italian law, parties recognized by the court as injured in the commission of crime can join the prosecution, question witnesses and possibly win damage awards in the case of conviction. “We think it is important to seek justice, above all to put in motion everything necessary to change the way of doing business so episodes like this can never be repeated,” Landini said. “We don’t think this is an isolated case. It is a mistake to think this problem can be resolved with this trial. We are worried because the season is starting again.”

North Korea criticized a recent agreement by Japan and the United States on co-producing air-to-air missiles as aggravating regional security risks and another example of Washington’s push to militarize Japan, state media said on Wednesday. At a time when the United States is upgrading its military command in Japan, the two countries’ cooperation in munitions production clearly has military and aggressive intentions aimed at countries in the region, KCNA state news agency said. The comments were attributed to an unnamed vice general director of the North’s defense ministry and did not name specific countries. But the official referred to the AIM-120 air-to-air missile system that the United States and Japan have agreed to accelerate co-producing during U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s visit to Tokyo on Sunday. Advancing the deployment of such a weapon used by aircraft involved in frequent military drills in the region that already pose a grave security threat adds a “new element of strategic instability to the Asia-Pacific region,” the official said.“Certainly, the center of gravity of the U.S. hegemony-oriented military security strategy is changing and it is a new warning signal for the Asia-Pacific regional society including the countries in Northeast Asia,” the official said. The agreement comes as “the U.S. has connived at and encouraged Japan’s moves for a military giant since last century,” the official said. In Tokyo, Hegseth and his Japanese counterpart agreed to accelerate a plan to jointly produce beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles and to consider co-producing other surface-to-air missiles. Hegseth stressed the importance of Japan’s role in deterring China including Beijing’s threat across the Taiwan Strait, calling it a “cornerstone” of security in the region. Such a positive recognition of Japan by Hegseth was in contrast with his criticism against European allies and U.S. President Donald Trump’s complaint that Tokyo has not done enough to support the presence of U.S. military in the country. It is a priority for North Korea to counter growing instability by bolstering its military deterrence, the Defense Ministry official said, without elaborating.